Mobile

At the Mobile World Congress today, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Windows Phone director Joe Belfiore showed what to expect from Windows Phone 7 later this year. We finally have a timeframe for the copy-and-paste update—it will arrive in the first two weeks of March—and we also got a first glimpse at a major update due in the second half of this year. The headline features of this big update are multitasking support for third-party applications and a new Web browser based on Internet Explorer 9.

In addition to copy-and-paste support, the new update includes substantial performance improvements, a better designed Marketplace application—and, it has now been confirmed, CDMA support. It was previously uncertain if CDMA support would be part of this update or if it would come later, which in turn made it unclear when Windows Phone 7 handsets would become available on Sprint and Verizon in the US. Both of those phone companies are due to ship Windows Phone 7 handsets in the first half of the year, and with the update they will be able to do so from March.